After talking with a hangar neighbor, Thorsten, about how to prime and paint my aircraft (he has a Europa), I became convinced that I needed to get a paint booth setup. This will help minimize overspray in the rest of the hangar, while giving the booth a relatively “clean” area to do sessions of priming. Perusing Amazon and YouTube, I settled on a Gorillas Pro small paint booth. The size seems ideal, with approximately 16.5′ x 8′ x 9′ dimensions, there is more than enough space to do most jobs while still being small enough to manage and store. It comes with a blower so everything I needed for basic setup was in a single package.
When it arrived yesterday, I was excited to do an initial setup test at home to make sure everything seemed copasetic. The boys helped out, and as you can see from the video, it was a successful trial.
Packing it up was pretty easy, but it takes some time for all the air to get out of the booth. Then you can wrap it up like an oversized sleeping bag and shove it into it’s reasonably sized storage bag.
This morning I wanted to see if the electrical load from the blower was going to be sustainable. Especially since I will need the air compressor to be running at the same time. The blower ended up drawing about 7 amps. Along with the air compressor, I was up over 11, but it was a sustainable amount. The booth itself fits really nicely in the hangar, and is a cinch to pack it up and store it in the loft when I am not using it.
I actually ordered an exhaust hood that connects up to that black area of the booth, which is the filtration area. It took a little bit of assembly, but was easy enough to get done. Still yet to come is the exhaust fan that should draw all that air through the correct filter, and using ducting out the hangar doors. One weird thing about the exhaust system is that it didn’t seem tall enough to free stand without some sort of support. For testing I just put a carboard box underneath, but I think in the end I will need to build something more appropriate. You can see in the last picture where the exhaust fan will hook up.
And the best part is, I think setup and teardown are each no more that 10 minutes to take care of and I can store everything up in the loft attic when not in use. I can’t wait to use it!
